


Fingers on the soul

by macavitykitsune



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate reality - soulmarks, Canon character deaths, Hakkai overthinks everything, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 05:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13427763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macavitykitsune/pseuds/macavitykitsune
Summary: The Saiyuki soulmarks fic that nobody wanted, and yet here I am. Alternatively, four soulmarks Cho Hakkai bears, and one he doesn't.





	Fingers on the soul

 

 

  * ****Kanan.****



 

Cho Gonou, like his twin, was born with a soulmark. The two lines of the cross on his belly intersected at his navel, as jewel-green and vivid as the matching one on his sister’s, unmistakable, a declaration of the fact of connection and, almost certainly, the first delicate flap of the butterfly’s wings that would eventually leave him storming uselessly at the gates of the orphanage, one skinny arm stretched through wrought iron towards the retreating form of his mother, the storm of Kanan’s cries high and raw in his ears as she was dragged away from him by one arm. He always remembered later that her dress was blue and yellow. He remembered that very clearly indeed. It felt important somehow. 

 

She wasn’t wearing blue or yellow, though, the evening she took him back to the tiny room above the restaurant in which she washed dishes. That dress was green as monsoon grass, green as her eyes as she leaned in and kissed him and kissed him, and time and fabric slipped from them almost without thinking, tugged by hands and nudged by mouths, fluid and instinctive. Until she saw his mark. She stopped dead for a moment, a terrible blank stillness slipping from her body into her eyes until they looked so much like his own that he couldn’t take it, paralysed by fear and fear of the truth, a hundred apologies for not telling her about his mark before this building up like ugly lies on his tongue even as she pulled the dress off entirely, and there. There, on her navel, just like his, her breath as quick as his, and of course they’d share that rhythm, when they took their first ones so close together. Of course, he thought dazedly, as his hand came up to cover that mark, and then he kissed her back, and gravity had its way with them. 

 

He’d tell himself later, tell himself repeatedly, that separating them had certainly been an overreaction on his mother’s part. Siblings could share soulmarks, after all, and so could parents and children, best friends and hated enemies. That fated touch between two people could generate a mark based on a plethora of relationships. There was no possible way she could have known, not by looking at four-year-olds, what they would become, what they would feel, the secret knowledge that had tugged and pulled taut between them. No way at all, and yet, and yet.

 

And yet, he thought, a sickening clarity in the crunch of blade against flesh, in the bite of Chin Yisou’s blade into his belly, stabbing into the very centre of his soul mark, just as Kanan had stabbed hers, and yet there must have been  _ something _ , something to tell her, something that must have told her something about the two of them, something…

 

  1. **Not Gojyo**



 

The fact of the matter, Cho Gonou decided, simply on the basis of empirical evidence, and entirely independently of his own feelings (whatever they might be) on the matter, was that Gojyo and he did not share a soulmark at all. 

 

It wasn’t as if he wanted to share a soulmark with him. It wasn’t as if he’d even wanted the one soulmark he’d ever had. It wasn’t as if he even thought that they were important, or as if he’d ever coexisted peacefully with the idea that some… force… could somehow discern the significance of two people to each other (or indeed that two people could be significant to each other), as if it were privy to things beyond choice and circumstance. It was simply that, in that moment, he’d blinked up at a stranger through the blur of rain and mud and pain and blood and thought, as soft and final as a petal falling to earth,  _ you, it’s you, I know you _ -

 

Well, it didn’t matter what he’d thought, in a moment that was clearly so subjective, not to mention probably irretrievably fogged over with trauma and barely being conscious. The facts were, after all, in evidence; even if he’d remained concerned about potentially sharing a soulmark with Gojyo, they simply didn’t have one in common. Gonou had seen other marks on him, here and there; a splash of dark blue across one lean shoulder, a spot and a V as dark as ink there, and down from his other shoulder to curl around his heart, a sinuous pattern of darkest green that Gonou’d only seen because Gojyo did love to pad around the house shirtless, and sometimes pantsless, too, long limbs bared carelessly to anyone who might see, nothing held guarded at all. Nothing about them matched, and Gonou hadn’t gained anything, the cross on his belly blurred out from blade and guts and blood until all that was left was that ugly mass of scar tissue, a gnarled reminder of all that he’d lost.

 

  1. **Goku**



 

He hadn’t, however, expected this. Hadn’t expected any of it, hadn’t expected to live, hadn’t expected the sun to break the horizon and find him alive and Hyakugan Maoh’s castle a charred ruin; it felt surreal, somehow, as if the wrong one of them had been destroyed, and some strange afterimage of himself continued to inhabit his ruined and too-strong body. And yet, in spite of it all, despite the pain radiating from his hollow eye socket, despite the torn-open stitches and the ache in his legs and the bruises spreading deep and ugly over the arm Goku had kicked… in spite of it all, there was this. There was sunlight on his face, soaking into his skin, and Gojyo standing tall and still and calm beside him as if he would never be elsewhere again, and Goku, who closed his eyes and smiled as sweetly as the earth blossoming into spring, and Sanzo’s chant shivering through his bones as if he were a bell that Sanzo’s voice had struck, the world trembling into place in some strange new configuration.

 

It was only later, looking down at his hands as the priests finally manacled them, that he saw the mark, shining gold in a ring around his little finger like a child’s promise. And perhaps it was strange to respond to the idea of that promise with unadulterated terror, and perhaps it was strange that that terror only made him smile, but he supposed, in the end, that to want to live required the acceptance of such perfect contradictions.

 

  1. **Sanzo**



 

Sanzo, he’d noticed, didn’t touch. His body language was tightly closed, skin shielded from touch, only his face and half his fingers bared to the world or reaching out for it. The tactic was familiar to Hakkai (Hakkai, Hakkai, the syllables still taste of salt and iron on his tongue, too new-minted still, catching awkwardly on his teeth like something he’s bitten off but can’t yet chew), and he kept a considerate distance, even as they tiptoed cautiously towards something that resembled the beginnings of a friendship. (Goku, of course, barreled into Sanzo at every opportunity, leaning against his side while they eat, tugging at his sleeve, seizing his arm and pulling him casually around. Even Gojyo - Gojyo, whose fingers curled so naturally around those red red apples, Gojyo, around whose finger Goku’s bright-gold soulmark curled as if it had always meant to be there - Gojyo touched Sanzo, and Sanzo, incredibly, permitted it.) Hakkai wondered sometimes, bitterly and so very, very privately, if Gojyo’s soulmark burned on Sanzo somewhere, if that mark he’d never seen for himself or on himself would appear on Sanzo and Goku instead. Intellectually, he knew that very few people bear just one soulmark, and it was ridiculous, really, to wonder why Goku and Sanzo and  _ why not him _ . Perhaps, he speculated, this was a luxury not granted to the dead. After all, Goku had never given him the slightest indication that he received a mark when he gave Hakkai - gave Gonou? - his. Perhaps he simply  _ couldn’t _ . 

 

The easy elision of the hypothesis came to a crashing halt on an otherwise unremarkable evening, at the end of hot pot and mahjongg, in the accidental brush of the side of Hakkai’s hand against Sanzo’s finger in the utterly prosaic act of handing him a cup of coffee. It slid entirely past Hakkai’s notice in the moment, and would likely have never registered even retrospectively, if it weren’t for the burning that woke him that night. He knew what it was. He knew, even, how it would look, the precise violet circle of it on his shoulder, so clear in his mind’s eye even if it could never be in his vision. Another chain, another manacle, tying him to here and now and himself, and he would have been angry if he weren’t so utterly, gracelessly relieved to feel it.

 

  1. **And perhaps, then, in the end, as it turns out**



 

the limiters fall to the floor, and the world explodes into movement and blood, the people in the room (youkai and not) almost still in comparison with the speed with which Hakkai moves. Violence, he has discovered, is a strangely academic experience; the incandescent rage he feels at the sight of Gojyo’s bruises burns cold, not hot, and the acts of slicing and gripping and breaking and tearing seem as goal-oriented as when he engages in the preparation of a salad. Gojyo’s hand is the first warm thing he touches since those first cold drops of rain - the heat of blood splatter, in his experience, has little to no warming effect in the long or even medium run - and Gojyo takes it, gripping it firmly and pulling himself back upright, and there. That, there, is reality, is an act and a choice and a completion, the fact and truth of Gojyo’s warm, rough hand and that sweet half-awed, half-delighted grin that pulls painfully against the cut on his face. Hakkai smiles back, bloody and bloodied and blissful, suddenly, relief and release in that final obedience to the force that had dragged him across town as unerringly as a magnet, that brought him to Gojyo’s location as if he’d walked those steps a thousand times, or a thousand and one.

 

Gojyo, he has noticed, leans towards him, traces his body towards him, instinctively (if he were in the mood to value himself so highly, he would think things like  _ like a flower to the sun) _ . He’s leaning towards Hakkai even now, as they walk home from the grubby basement of the grubby building where Gojyo had been imprisoned, the slope of his shoulder towards Hakkai, the little wry quirk to his mouth before he hisses in pain as it tugs on the cuts, and Hakkai resolves right then to learn how to use his qi for healing, to learn how to smooth every trace of their ugliness from his skin and bones and muscles until it’s only Gojyo there, all of the hurt wiped out, just the quiet steady goodness in him that’s as matter-of-fact as Hakkai’s heartbeat, and as vital - as sweetly, horrifyingly, exhilaratingly necessary to his continued existence. The simplicity of that truth stops him in his tracks, tangles his hand in Gojyo’s jacket until he can’t move further from him either. Hakkai drags him in awkwardly, off-balance from his own strength, from the strength of his want, but Gojyo catches himself, sure-footed as ever, and then catches  _ him _ , fits their bodies together as if he’d been planning to do that all along, somehow. The gentleness of his grip is the only thing that betrays his surprise when his hand curls around Hakkai’s hip, warm and large, so large that the tip of his thumb brushes over the edge of the scar, and oh.  _ Oh.  _  There it is again, the resonance of that pull from inside him, where Gojyo’d pieced him together and held him together all those months ago, from that very first night, where of course he couldn’t see, could only know - if he’d trusted his own heart to know it. There it is,  binding and real, his own hand pressing to Gojyo’s shoulder, over the vines there - vines,  _ vines _ , green vines, how had he ever missed it - and the brush of Gojyo’s mouth against his is gentle, brief, a recognition and a promise, but not a question, never a question….but Hakkai holds him tight, and tighter, and answers anyway. 


End file.
